Understanding Your Dreams: My Surprise Post!

Old Treasures on Tuesdays 👑

“You have turned for me my mourning into dancing…” (Ps. 30:11, NKJV).

Today’s post is an inspiration by Stephanie Pavlantos – thank you, my dear sister, for this suggestion! Stephanie requested that I take one of my dreams and break it down for you, using the steps that I’ve described in this series. This struck me as the perfect way to bring it all to a lovely close. So here goes!

The Dream

Here is what I recorded in my dream journal on May 11, 2018, which I entitled Bleached Eyebrows Dream:

“I’d apparently had my hair dyed blonde. But the person who did it said my eyebrows and lashed needed to match. I didn’t realize they had followed through with this until I looked in the mirror. I saw then that the bleach had done a number on my face. Some of the coloring of my skin had been bleached. The bleach had leaked onto just parts of it. I saw that my brows and lashes had dissolved. It was a vivid picture. I washed off the bleach, and in doing so, pretty much all remaining traces of my brows and lashes washed away (there had only been light red fragments left).

“I was startled, looking at myself, asking in my mind, ‘What am I going to do for the program?’ I was supposed to dance in a program at Grace [my childhood church], and it was about to start. Then I looked in the mirror again. Suddenly, there were three arched lines of dramatic black makeup there, one over each eye, and one in the middle connecting the other two. These really stuck out visually. I thought, surprised, ‘But I didn’t put those there!’ I realized [in the dream] that it was God, and He had given me a solution to the problem.”

(I looked really strange in this imagery, with my three exaggerated eyebrows. I could easily have dismissed it as just another weird dream. But when I leaned in to listen, I had a sense it was a dream from God. It was vitally important for me to pay attention to His voice and not rely on my own human logic in the matter. I am now so grateful I obeyed and wrote it down, as this dream ended up having an enormously important message in it for me.)

The Focus

What was clearly the most important imagery in the dream was me and my eyebrows.

List of Symbols

Here is what I originally wrote down, back when I had the dream almost two years ago. Notice I did not pick every image from the dream; only the ones that stuck out as the most important:

–> brows and lashes: protect and frame the eye
–> bleach: cleansing
–> eyes: spiritual sight
–> Grace: empowerment (Notice how this was a personalized symbol from
my own life experience.)
–> dance: my spirit’s joy
–> black: mystery
–> three: resurrection, divine completeness

(I found those last two symbols in a Spirit-filled dream dictionary. I often look up colors and numbers that way.)

Initial Thoughts

I wasn’t fully sure, but I gave it a shot, doing my best to lean into Holy Spirit. Beginning to ruminate on the matter with Him is part of the process. Here is what I initially came up with, at that time:

“A complete cleansing/purging of my natural realm way of looking at things, washed away in the water of Holy Spirit. May look strange, alter my presenting appearance, but it’s You, Lord. You now cover and protect my seeing with Your mysteries. This prepares me to dance freely in grace. Taking away dependence on the natural for seeing and replacing it with Your resource. It reminds me of this Scripture:

‘“Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns without walls… For I,” says the Lord, “will be a wall of fire all around her, and I will be the glory in her midst”’ (Zech. 2:4-5, NKJV).”

(This was not the end of the matter. I had not yet received the full meaning from God. That would come quite a while later.)

Prophetic Re-emphasis

Shortly after recording the dream, I added this note to it: “At the hair salon a week later, Jerry offered to bleach my eyebrows.”

This was fascinating because my hairdresser, in all the years of going to him, had never before offered me that service. He never has since, either. I knew it was Holy Spirit adding a “highlighter” to my dream, underscoring its importance. I frequently find that He comes up with creative ways to do that.

Dream Revisit

Nearly two years later, I was reading back through the dream journal where I keep this dream. Suddenly, about a half-hour after I revisited it, Holy Spirit started talking to me about it. I was riding on a motocarro (local taxi) at the time. Out of the blue, He dropped in the meaning of the dream, and my spirit got so excited! When I got home, I eagerly added these to my list of symbols:

–> brows: facial expression; expression of the soul
–> bleaching: removal of my soul’s expression. I became ‘washed out.’”

On that ride, I suddenly understood Holy Spirit’s symbolism. He was showing me a spiritual picture of what had happened to me. I had been through quite a bit of upheaval in the years previous to my dream. My painful experiences had effectively put to death my soul’s natural enthusiasm and expressivity. Eyebrows are the markers of facial expressions. Their removal symbolized this death.

So I then added this to the end of my journal entry:

“Daddy God, You are resurrecting what died. You are bringing forth so much new life that You are even giving me extra-accentuated expression (the vividness of the black eyebrows)! This is a resurrection into becoming an exuberantly expressive soul, turning my mourning into dancing!”

After-thoughts

Isn’t that cool? Once I received the final interpretation from Holy Spirit, there was such joy in my heart. The way I heard John Paul Jackson describe it, when you receive the true interpretation from God, you experience a wonderful sense of relief. It’s like your spirit sighs a great sigh of satisfaction, and exclaims, “That’s it!” Something just clicks. All of a sudden, you just “know” in your “knower” what the meaning is.

This does not mean that I completely dismissed the previous thoughts I had written down about the dream. It seems like they were a partial understanding of what God was saying. But the main understanding came almost two years later.

Here’s one more thing. Even today, in revisiting this dream again to share it with you, Holy Spirit explained more of it to me! Here are three more symbols He illuminated:

–> my face: my identity. My sense of identity had also been affected by the painful circumstances I endured. Beautiful Jesus has been bringing healing there too.
–> mirror: The Word of God. As we look into His Word, He shows us the state of our souls, and He teaches us who we are (James 1:23-24).
–> program about to start: This new healing work was about to begin in me.

Once you have the main meaning, Holy Spirit loves to flesh out the rest of the details for you, as you go back over His personally tailored message once again with Him. What an adventure it is, walking along this rich, rewarding path with Him, leaning on our Beloved, learning of Him every step of the way!

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And that, folks, is a wrap! I hope you’ve been helped and blessed by this series. I’d love to hear your feedback on it! What has God spoken to your heart as you’ve been following along?